San Diego hotels charged 22.8% more per available room during the week of August 9–15 than they did during the same week a year earlier, the sharpest year-over-year increase of any major U.S. hotel market that week, according to weekly data from CoStar Group.
Revenue per available room, or RevPAR, hit $201.10 in San Diego for the week, while the average daily rate climbed to $249.71, up 12.6% from the same week in 2025. Both figures topped every other market CoStar tracks among the nation’s largest hotel destinations.
Two big draws landed on the same calendar
The spike traces back to a scheduling coincidence. LPL Focus 2026, the financial services giant’s annual conference, filled San Diego’s convention-adjacent hotels the same week that country stars Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan played a joint concert in the city, according to CoStar’s report. Business travelers and concertgoers competing for the same limited room supply pushed rates well above where they sat the previous August.
The jump stood out against a national backdrop. Hotel RevPAR rose a comparatively modest 6.2% year-over-year nationwide, and ADR rose 3.5%, according to a breakdown of the same CoStar data published by Hospitality Net. San Diego’s growth ran roughly triple and quadruple those national averages, respectively.
Why a single week can swing so hard
Hotel pricing in convention-heavy cities is unusually sensitive to calendar overlap. A single large conference can absorb thousands of room nights in a compressed few days, and operators respond by raising rates as available inventory shrinks — a dynamic hotel analysts call compression pricing. Add a stadium-filling concert to the same week and the two demand spikes stack rather than compete, since business travelers and concertgoers are typically booking different neighborhoods and room types across the same metro area.
CoStar’s weekly hotel surveys, produced with STR benchmark data, are the industry’s standard tool for tracking room rates and occupancy across the country’s top markets, and hotel operators watch them closely when deciding how aggressively to price rooms week to week.
What it means for travelers
For anyone with a San Diego trip on the calendar, the takeaway is straightforward: room rates move with local event schedules, sometimes sharply. Checking whether a major conference or concert overlaps with planned travel dates — and shifting a booking by even a few days — can mean the difference between paying convention-week prices and a far more typical San Diego rate. The city’s hotel market has been climbing steadily all year on strong tourism demand, but few single weeks have shown a swing this pronounced.
